Monthly Archives: August 2021

What I Read, July 2021

Posted on by under book review, month in review, Old Wives' Tale 21, OldWivesTale21, review, Uncategorized

July was for roadtripping, not reading. We made an epic 4000-mile trip to Montana, Wyoming, and South Dakota and back again, a trip filled with glorious landscapes, terrible meals (I do like fry bread, though, even if a little goes a long way), and irrefutable evidence of our changed climate: heat, drought, fire. Sobering isn’t the word. Our exhilaration at being together as a family outside in wonderful places was undermined by our anxiety about masks (that is, their almost total absence) and the low-level irritation at finding ways to eat outside to keep our unvaccinated daughter safe. Anyway, those Western States are amazing—go if you ever have the chance! Sitting in a car and hiking through national parks didn’t leave much time for books—though the book shopping (in Missoula, MT and Omaha, NE) was great. Here’s what I found time for.

Edward Burtynsky, Railcuts #1, Canadian National track, Skihist Provincial Park, British Columbia (1980s?)

Menachem Kaiser, Plunder: A Memoir of Family Property and Nazi Treasure (2021)

Regular readers know I’m critical of third-generation Holocaust memoirs. (Memoirs written by grandchildren of survivors.) When I heard about Plunder, in which Menachem Kaiser sets out to reclaim a family apartment building in Poland, I reacted the way I always do—with skepticism mingled with resignation (I knew I’d read it) and curiosity (I only know of one other book that’s similar, Rutu Modan’s The Property). It didn’t take long, though, before I recognized the special qualities of Kaiser’s book. It’s so smart and interesting! So self-reflective—which all 3G memoirs ought to be—and, even better, without being annoying about it. It’s even funny. As Kaiser plunges into his quixotic enterprise—his extended family doesn’t know what to make of it, after all his father’s father died eight years before Kaiser was born, who is he to take up this quest, what does he expect to get from it?—things gets complicated. Does the building even exist anymore? What would you do with the people who live in it now? How do you prove to Polish authorities that someone has died?

Throughout, Kaiser’s grandfather remains an enigma, but one of the man’s cousins turns out to have written a memoir of his time in the Gros-Rosen concentration camp complex, a book that has become legendary in a surprising and surprisingly large community of treasure seekers who live to ferret out the secrets of Silesian caves. (There’s supposed to be a train full of Nazi hidden somewhere.) Next thing you know, Kaiser’s squeezing into underground tunnels hacked out by slave labour in the waning days of the war, getting drunk with weekend treasure hunters, and learning first-hand how family histories are usually litanies of error.

Basically, Plunder is brilliant from the title on. Whether as noun or verb, plunder is the perfect term to encapsulate the connotations of avarice, need, and longing that accompany any attempt to grasp the past. It’s a fantastic book, which I’ll be assigning next spring for sure.

Wendy Lower, The Ravine: A Family, a Photograph, a Holocaust Massacre Revealed (2021)

Lower’s short book—well under 200 pages before notes—manages to be both highly specific and usefully wide ranging. The specific part concerns a photograph of an execution in the Ukraine in October 1941. There are not many visual representations of what’s come to be called “the Shoah by Bullets,” and almost none that show, like this one, a Jewish family being murdered together. Lower set out to learn everything she could about the photo. Who were the victims and who the perpetrators? Who took the picture? Could she find the location of the murder? Her aim, she writes, was:

to break the frame around the crime scene, which kept the victims frozen in that awful moment. The photograph captures an event locked in time, but I knew it was part of a fluid situation. What precede that moment of death, what followed, and what happened to each person visible there?

Lower diligently answers these questions—the photo is even more poignant and terrible than initial inspection suggests—but she also has a larger agenda. Not only does she explain how the genocide was implemented, especially by the Einsatzgruppen in their push east during the invasion of the Soviet Union, but she also usefully and expansively defines collaboration. Plus, she shows us how the past is excavated, by survivors, archaeologists, and historians. All of this in lucid, accessible prose. The Ravine isn’t a comprehensive Holocaust history by any means, but there are many worse places to start learning about it. I’ll be moderating a panel with Lower at this year’s Six Bridges Literary Festival; can’t wait to see her in action.

Fonda Lee, Jade City (2017)

Enjoyable fantasy novel about a world in which only people known as Green Bones are able to harness the power of magical jade, which heightens their warrior powers. An uneasy truce among rival clans, which has held since the end of a war of independence, collapses when one group begins to traffic in a synthetic jade substitute. Jade City, the first in a trilogy that will conclude this fall, is a Godfather / martial arts mashup with juicy characters, but more than anything it’s about cartels and gangs and bureaucrats. Even if, like me, you don’t read much fantasy, you might really like this.

Joanna Pocock, Surrender: The Call of the American West (2019)

I’m working—a little too desultorily, I’m afraid—on something about this book and my trip to the American West, so maybe I’ll have more to say later, but I do want you all to know how good this perfectly titled essay/memoir is. Pocock moved from the UK to Missoula, Montana, a place that entranced her—even having spent only three days there I totally understand why—and prompted her to explore various ways of living with others and the land. The West—where land feels present in a way I’ve never experienced elsewhere—will do that to you. Pocock meets ecosexuals, foragers on “the Hoop” (a circular route around the Western US, once followed by indigenous tribes from season to season), minutemen, mining company shills, and hunters keen to hunt wolves. Mostly—cliché, I know, but she finesses it—she meets herself. Approaching midlife, to what or whom does she want to surrender? I strongly recommend.

Gil Adamson, Ridgerunner (2020)

Took this book—kindly sent me by its American publicist—on vacation because I thought it was set in Montana. In fact, it takes place mostly in Alberta, specifically in what in 1917 was still called Rocky Mountains National Park (it was renamed Banff, after its main railway station, in 1930). As someone who grew up hiking its trails, I was amazed at how much I learned: Lake Louise was once called Laggan; interned POWs, known to the locals as Germans but mostly from Austro-Hungary, specifically Galicia, built much of the road that is now the Trans-Canada highway; the Stoney Nakoda and other indigenous people were forcibly removed from the park. Adamson handles this history deftly, using it to serve her story about Jack Boulton, a twelve-year-old whose mother dies, at the beginning of the book, of an illness that almost fells him too, leading his father to make a deal with the woman who nursed the boy back to health: he will leave him with her while he handles his grief by taking off. The man, William Moreland, is a former thief (his nickname gives the novel its title); he returns to his life of genteel crime, crisscrossing the Canadian/US border, stealing from abandoned ranger cabins and planting harmless explosions in mining towns (when everyone rushes to check out the noise, he slips into hotels and mine offices to purloin jewels and cash). Moreland has a plan—to gather enough money for the boy’s future before reclaiming him. The erstwhile nurse has another—to make Jack her own. Before long Jack legs it back to the family homestead, where he gets by with help from his nearest neighbour. (I picture their cabins somewhere between Carrot Creek and Dead Man’s Flats, if you know the area: that is, the very eastern edge of the park, some of the most beautiful country in the world.)

At first I was skeptical about Ridgerunner—I thought it might be overwritten and dutiful like so much Canadian literary fiction—but I was quickly won over. Yes, the plot skirts melodrama, especially at the end. It seems Adamson decided the book needed drama, which she sandwiched into the last fifty pages; I understand the reasoning without being convinced. After all, the best bits are about how Jack survives on the land (mostly) on his own; these descriptions are compelling without being self-consciously lyrical and I didn’t need anything more. The other weakness of the book’s construction is that the Jack and Moreland sections sit uneasily together. But Adamson has an elegant, loose style (like a less earnest Ondaatje), she can be funny, and she’s damn good on horses. Ridgerunner is a sequel to Adamson’s previous novel, The Outlander, which, I gather, tells how Mary Boulton and William Moreland met. (The Frank Slide features prominently.) It holds up just fine on its own, though. Feel like this has gone totally under the radar Stateside, and that’s a shame; it deserves a better fate.

Elly Griffiths, The Crossing Places (2009)

Home from holiday and at a loose reading end, I happened upon this in the neighbourhood Little Free Library (usually a wasteland of self-help and James Patterson). It was just what I needed, a no-fuss, competently written crime novel with an engaging Norfolk setting and the feel of a romance novel in its setting up of what I am guessing will be a slow-burning “will they or won’t they” relationship between its two leads, a professor of archaeology and a cop.

Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories (1976)

It’ll make some folks sad, but I did not care for this book, which I bought in Missoula, because how could I not? (As children Maclean and his brother discover that—you can read this quote all over town—“the world… was full of bastards, the number increasing rapidly the farther one gets from Missoula, Montana.”) Reading the book during and after our trip, I enjoyed recognizing its landscapes, and I appreciated the author’s love of western Montana (all the while thinking how sad he’d be at its changed climate). But mostly I found it a slog. Its attitudes to women are old-fashioned and tiresome, its humour misfires, and its detailed descriptions made me less not more interested in fly-fishing: I couldn’t square his complicated instructions with the elegant arabesques I’d seen in men and women performing in swift-running rivers across Montana. Of the book’s three stories, I enjoyed “USFS 1919” the most, because it’s about being in the woods and hiking, which I can relate to, especially since I’d walked some of the very same trails just days earlier. Yet its plot, too, fell victim to the boyish/loutish hijinks I didn’t care for in the other two. It’s all very hearty and stoic and, friends, you know that’s just not me.

Dolores Hitchens, Sleep with Strangers (1955)

Library of America has done us all a favour by reissuing this seriously good California PI novel from a prolific midcentury writer. It’s got the elements we know from Hammett and Chandler but deploys them at an angle. Jim Sader is a good guy with demons (he is a mostly sober alcoholic, he gets involved with his clients in inappropriate ways); as such he’s is a familiar character, but less macho, less hard-bitten. The plot of Sleep with Strangers is appropriately complicated, but less preposterous than, say, The Big Sleep’s. Hitchens takes her female characters, especially their motivations, much more seriously than the canonical writers of American noir. Sader’s relationship to his younger partner is unexpectedly moving (an alternate universe version of the one between Spade and Archer in The Maltese Falcon). On the basis of this novel I’d say Hitchens is a more straightforward writer than Dorothy Hughes, but she’s definitely in the same league. And the second (and sadly final) Sader novel, which I finished just too late to include in this July list, is even better: a truly excellent example of the genre.

Elly Griffiths, The Janus Stone (2010)

How quickly things change. I ran out to buy the second in the Ruth Galloway series before I’d even finished the first. Alas, my initial enthusiasm might have been misguided. The archaeology bits didn’t interest me much (big liability in these books), and the ending was silly. Will Ruth have to be rescued in every book? Unsure if I’ll persist. Sophomore slump maybe?

Arnold Bennett, The Old Wives’ Tale (1908)

Rohan and I—along with valiant readers from around the world—read this novel over several weeks. You can read my posts here, and hers here. The tl;dnr: a naturalist novel about sisters whose life paths at first seem different but ultimately aren’t. Thoughtful about the meaning of change, poignant about the frailty that afflicts us all as we age, interesting about technological and social change. It’s no Middlemarch, but Bennett didn’t deserve Woolf’s opprobrium. I’ll read more by him, even if it probably won’t be any time soon. Which ones do you recommend?

Dorothea Lange, TheRoad West, 1938

How about you? Did you read anything good last month? Hope you’re surviving whatever weather and political shenanigans are plaguing wherever you are. (I fervently wish they are better than this August in Arkansas.) As my sabbatical comes to its end, my reading time is about to plummet. In the meantime I’m trying to squeeze a few last titles in—more on that in a couple of weeks!

“The Bully, Destiny”: Still More of The Old Wives’ Tale

Posted on by under Old Wives' Tale 21, OldWivesTale21, readalong, review

After an unexpected and busy vacation across parts of the American West in which reading time was in short supply I returned home to The Old Wives’ Tale. Took me a minute to get my groove back, but I eventually found myself unable to stop and read straight through to the end. I promise not to reference the final chapters so that Rohan can have her say. (I will note, though, that I might have enjoyed writing about the book more if we’d finished it first, but I also realize I wouldn’t have paid attention to the earlier parts as much had we done so.) Anyway, I have a long section to cover, and I’ll just scrape the surface, so please add to the conversation in the comments.

Jean Béraud, Paris Kiosk, ca. 1880 – 1884

As I read about Sophia’s life after Gerald—how good that she has a life after Gerald, and what an interesting one it is!—I found myself struck by one passage in particular. Not an exciting one: no hoarding of food stuffs, no balloon rides to escape a besieged city, no business or sexual propositions, nothing like that. But to me it got at a central concern. It comes after Sophia—now proprietress and landlady of a successful boarding-house catering to English tourists in Paris, known to her guests as Mrs. Frensham, after the previous owner—has been approached by Matthew Peel-Swynnerton, scion of a Five Towns family and friend to Sophia’s nephew, Cyril Povey. Sophia suspects that Matthew has recognized her as the woman who ran away from Bursley thirty years ago. In the time it takes for each to twig to the other, the routines of years are overturned. Sophia retires to bed early, leaving her second-in-command to deal with the thousand details that must be managed for an establishment like Frensham’s to keep ticking along. Alone in her room, Sophia wonders if the elegant young man could really be acquainted with her family. He’s too young to know her sister’s husband. More to the point, isn’t he far too wealthy, far too important, far too socially-prestigious to have anything to do with the likes of the Poveys? Even the illness of her beloved poodle, Fossette (the novel’s greatest character) takes second place to the thoughts whirling through her head:

Moreover – a detail of which she had at first unaccountably failed to mark the significance – this Peel-Swynnerton was a friend of the Mr. Povey as to whom he had inquired … In that case it could not be the same Povey. Impossible that the Peels should be on terms of friendship with Samuel Povey or his connexions! But supposing after all they were! Supposing something utterly unanticipated and revolutionary had happened in the Five Towns!

Copying this passage now I notice the awkward syntax of the first sentence—mimicking, perhaps, Sophia’s flustered state. I realize too how typical it is that I would seize on a moment that references significance, and the failure of a first reading: fits the struggle I’ve been having to know what matters most in this book, what kind of significance it aims at. But what snagged me at the time, and what, reading on, I returned to again and again as a way to make sense of the novel’s concerns, was the word “revolutionary.” My first posts were preoccupied by the novel’s unstable tone, so I won’t belabor that topic here, but much hinges on how ironic we take that adjective to be.

The word choice could be a sign of Sophia’s irreducible Baines-ness, her provincialism, her lifelong alignment with the values of her childhood. When she returns to Staffordshire she herself broods over these concepts: both consciously kicking against the small-mindedness of a world that seems to her unchanged, and unconsciously manifesting similar traits by having lived in a small and unchanging Paris that has nothing to do with the elegance or cultural avant-gardism that intrigues someone like Doctor Stirling, whose love of Zola, for example, is not reciprocated by the woman who lived the events of his novels without really noticing them. On this reading, “revolutionary” would have to be ironic, the narrator poking fun at Sophia’s misguided sense of what counts as radical or extraordinary. We’d have to conclude that a social order in which Peels consort with Poveys would be a change, yes, but hardly a revolution.

And yet—for Peels to know Poveys is a big deal, even if the circumstance happened gradually, undramatically, such that one could never point to a single moment and say “then, that’s when this happened.” To demonstrate that change is inexorable—evolution in the strictly Darwinian sense, with no telos, no moral judgment: neither progress nor regression—becomes increasingly important to the novel as it comes to its conclusion. All of which is to say that I think we should take “revolutionary” straight: heartfelt on Sophia’s part and endorsed by the narrator.

As I thought more about it, I became convinced the word mattered a whole lot. The big question posed by Bennett in this novel is nothing less than: What is the meaning of revolution? A subset of related questions follows: Could the idea of a gradual revolution be anything other than an oxymoron? Is revolution a concept worth hanging on to, or should we discard it in favor of something else, perhaps simply change? What, in the end, changes in our lives? How much do we remain the people we always were? How much do we reinvent ourselves? How much do we slide into lives that our younger selves could never have imagined? It seems to me now that when Sophia, in that crucial encounter I wrote about earlier, drawing on the values of her upbringing and inflecting them with her own personality, first rejected and then accepted Gerald at the site of the old mine and the new railway (these standing as examples, and critiques, of progress), the novel was already staging a scene by which we could begin to ask such questions.

I snagged on the reference to revolution because I was surprised by the oblique, even casual way Bennett dealt with the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune. I had guessed these would feature as prominently as the execution of the criminal that Rohan wrote about last time. But I see now that it makes sense that this relatively minor event would be of larger importance to this novel than the big ones of public history. The execution matters less for questions of justice and more for Gerald’s rather pathetic response, for the final wedge it drives between him and Sophia, for her realization that no one will take care of her but herself. Thus the war with Prussia and the subsequent insurrection appear as the stuff of rumours, fantasies, and speculation—the latter in two senses of the term, since Sophia begins making her fortune by scrounging the shops in order to buy low and sell high. I wouldn’t say the novel is dismissive of these events—the material struggle, pain, and loss is real—but it’s convinced that for most people (or at least for Sophia and the world she operates in) their effects are muffled, reduced to the pressing but local questions of where to sleep and what to eat. At times, Bennett employs an almost Flaubertian irony in the bathos by which History appears. Sophia notes the end of the Second Empire, for example, only in the “mechanical” observation that it is a lot easier for women to sit in a carriage now that crinolines have gone out of fashion.

But Bennett doesn’t just give us the “ordinary person’s” perspective on momentous events. He gives us Sophia’s. Which is governed by her upbringing and the Baines values that she never shakes, even as she seems to build a life so different from anything her family can understand. She, unlike her husband or like Chirac when he clings to the false rumour that the French have scored a decisive victory over Pussian forces, has no truck with the idea of sudden reversals, coups de théâtre that reverse a bad situation (whether in politics or in household finances). For Sophia, such thinking could only be a fantasy (which contributes to my sense that the book is imagining alternate ideas of revolution). Sophia doesn’t flee Paris when the Prussians encircle the city—not from her love for her adopted home but from beliefs that come straight from Staffordshire:

She ardently wished to be independent, to utilize on her own behalf the gifts of organization, foresight, common sense, and tenacity which she knew she possessed and which had lain idle. And she hated the idea of flight.

Ironic, that last line, given her absconding with Gerald, but the point of this section of the novel is that she never flew from anything, really. She is happy during the siege because “she had a purpose in life and was depending upon herself.” That self-reliance, which kicks into overdrive after her collapse and illness—and it’s fascinating how much she struggles to recognize what she owes to the women who saved her, whose life choices she cannot respect and whom she ultimately displaces—is her greatest strength. She names it “pride”, and it is the most noted continuity with her sister, her upbringing, and the whole world of the first part of the novel. Yet it is also a weakness, in that it keeps her from life, prevents her from getting entangled with others, which is often to the good (hard to see what would be gained from agreeing to the advances of men like Niepce or Carlier, and life with Chirac might well have been a less awful but still subordinating version of life with Gerald) but ultimately makes her somewhat brittle and self-satisfied. I need to hold my tongue and wait until Rohan writes about the very end before commenting more on how we’re asked to evaluate Sophia, when all is said and done, but confining myself to what we’ve read so far, I think the New Year’s scene with Chirac was brilliantly handled, delicately describing the pleasant fug of sensual pleasure to which Sophia might have succumbed/given herself, and her ultimate inability to do so. The right thing to do, but still a missed opportunity, a complication we are more permitted to see than Sophia is herself. (So interesting, just as an aside, how few good/decent men there are in this book. Maybe only Povey? What do you all think?)

Rejecting Chirac allows Sophia to accept a new career. But running a pension, especially one as big as Frensham’s, means a life of endless labour. Like the domestic labour that it transposes to the business realm, the work of organizing the cleaning and cooking and managing of dozens of tourists involves constant running just to stay still. (Teaching, the career Sophia was set on and regrets the loss of, constitutes a similar treadmill, though it offers more gratification in the sense that teachers see pupils develop and move on to other things.) The end result of all the changes in Sophia’s life—escaping Gerald via her interregnum as a landlady to owning Frenshams—is an odd kind of stasis. Which brings me again to the idea of change, and what it means in this novel. I don’t want to foreclose the idea of revolution, but I think Bennett is pointing to an idiosyncratic, gradual meaning of the term, in which the gradual abrasions of daily life lead to changes we can see, let alone understand, only in retrospect. Could one reason Woolf had it out for him was that, like her modernist fellows, she believed in the more conventional sense of revolution: rupture, trauma, human nature changing on or about a certain date?

I’ll end with a point of continuity in the novel that surprised me—and that might also speak to my uncertainty of what change means or does in this novel. Elephants! That first one who comes to an untimely end at the Fair was not just a bizarre one-off. The landlord of the restaurant where Chirac and Sophia have their New Year’s feast proudly tells them of a friend, a butcher, “who has bought the three elephants of the Jardin des Planes for twenty-seven thousand francs.” (Two really were killed for their meat.) Seventy pages later, Sophia, returned to England and reunited with Constance, looks out the train window and is surprised to see “two camels and an elephant in a field close to the line,” which her sister tells her is the central depot of Barnum’s circus, a source of civic pride because the location, so close to Bursley, is in the very middle of England (and “there can be only one middle”). It is fanciful, but I think elephants will return one more time, a mere echo, to be sure, but a striking one, late in the novel (this is the only forward glance I’ll allow myself) when a shock to Sophia is described as a “crude, spectacular shame… that the gallant creature should be so maltreated by the bully, destiny.” Sounds to me like all the poor elephants in this novel. And that resonant phrase, “the bully, destiny,” returns us to the question of change. Will the end of the novel vitiate the very possibility? Or will it ask us to redefine what we mean by it? Stay tuned for the moving conclusion of The Old Wives’ Tale…